Seeing Symphonically
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York
- 300 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Looks at how a group of aesthetically innovative independent films contested and imagined alternatives to urban planning in midcentury New York.
Can the cinema imagine a different way of developing, using, and living in the city? Is it possible to do so using images of the extant city? Seeing Symphonically shows how a group of independent experimental, documentary, and feature films made in and about late modern New York City did just this. Between 1939 and 1964, as the city was being utterly remade by a combination of urban renewal projects, suburbanization, and high-rise public housing, the New York avant-garde reinvented the city symphony, a modernist form that depicted a day in the life of an urban environment through complex montage, optical effects, and street portraiture. Erica Stein documents how these New York City symphonies subverted and critiqued urban redevelopment through their aesthetics, particularly their rhythms, and, through those same rhythms, envisioned a world in which urban inhabitants have the absolute right to remake the city according to their needs, outside the demands of capital.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Carving Out an Island
- 1 Tomorrow Has No Smell: The City, Regional Planning, and the National Day
- 2 City/Text: Weegee’s New York, Urban Renewal, and the Miniature-Gigantic
- 3 Secret Passages: Symphonies of the Margins, Slum Clearance, and Blight
- 4 Spectacle in Progress: Symphonies of the Center and Advocacy Planning
- 5 Image/City/Fracture: The Cool World, the Urban Crisis, and Nostalgia for Modernity
- Coda: Repair
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Back Cover